Beginning January 2026, All Acm Publications Will Be Made Open Access
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The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is shaking things up by making all its publications open access starting January 2026, sparking a lively debate among commenters. Some are thrilled, with long-time advocates like guerby and PaulHoule rejoicing after waiting decades for this change, while others are curious about what this means for accessibility and the quality of publications. However, not everyone is having a smooth ride, as some users are being blocked by the ACM's "aggressive firewall" when trying to access the site, with workarounds involving VPNs. As the open access era begins, liampulles is already asking for recommendations on must-read publications, although vbarrielle notes that only new publications will be affected, leaving old ones behind the paywall.
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It just took them 30 years :)
The ACM always said it wanted to build bridges with practitioners but paywalled journals aren't the way to do it.
I would be 100% for more green cards or a better guestworker program of some kind, but I've seen so many good people on H-1Bs twisted into knots... Like the time the startup I was working for hired a new HR head and two weeks in treated an H-1B so bad the HR person quit. I wanted to tell this guy "your skills are in demand and you could get a job across the street" but that's wasn't true.
I joined the IEEE Computer Society because it had a policy to not have a policy which I could accept.
But I'm not sure if it is about your IP or the whole country but I guess it the former. Who knows what the firewall god at Cloudflare does.
I haven’t been able to find anything that states otherwise. What changes in January is the policy for new publications.
> Making the first 50 years of its publications and related content freely available expresses ACM’s commitment to open access publication and represents another milestone in our transition to full open access within the next five years.
( from https://www.acm.org/articles/bulletins/2022/april/50-years-b... )
I wouldn't have understood that nuance without the context given by your comment, but in my developer mind I analogize "freely available" to a "source available" license that they took on, as a step towards going open access ("free and open source") over time. I'm also happy to see that that transition seems on track as planned.
Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) which for ACM is $1450 in 2026 and expected to go up. Authors from lower-middle income countries get a discount. [1]
Authors are often associated with institutions (e.g. universities) who can cover the APC on behalf of the author through a deal with the journal. For the institution, now instead of paying the subscriber fee and publishing for free, they pay a publishing fee and everyone reads for free.
1. https://authors.acm.org/open-access
Knowing the reality of the Brazilian's public universities, the bureaucracy of the Government and the condition of the students in general, I'm pretty sure we won't have articles from Brazil anymore.
Note the maths becomes substantially worse when you look at poorer countries than brazil.
[1]: https://steamdb.info/app/2807960/
Needless to say I prefer open access since those outside institutions can then read science, but the incentive model is heavily broken, and I'm not sure it's a good price to pay for the reward.
Found,
> Once your paper has been accepted, we will confirm your eligibility automatically through the eRights system, and you’ll get to choose your Creative Commons license (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND).
For those fields with an existing market, meaning there is more than one high quality journal, the market will provide the right incentives for those publishers.
That top tier publishers create new low-tier journals for this market shows that they are very well aware of these incentives and risks. They are not flooding their top journals with low quality OA "pay to publish" articles, which was the argument from OP.
One hope might be that it incentivises institutions away from the publish or perish mind set and starts to discourage salami slicing and other such practices, allowing researchers to focus on putting out less work of a higher quality, but I suspect the fees would need to be larger to start seeing this sort of change.
I am certain that that no system is perfect. My belief is that the Closed Access publishers have had free reign for so long that the largest ones abuse the system and competitive models are useful to restore some balance. The model also restricts access to information.
I would argue that one downside to Open Access is that incentives volume over quality (as others have said) but I would judge that on a per publisher basis just as I would any publisher. Closed Access models might also provide publication in areas of research that don't get tons of attention and research money.
I would also argue that there are other problems within research such as lack of reproducible results in many papers that is a far more pressing issue. Just my 2 cents. Thank you for the honest discussion.
Like some escrow account that the universities pay into and the publisher payouts go to whoever best enables their authors to do the most useful work... as determined by the other authors.
There's got to be ways to improve things though.
An AI or search engine that identified the value of a contribution and paid the author directly from advertising money based on query traffic could be a way to solve this.
> The only way we'll pay you ever again is through {the protocol}, deal with it.
If people just sought out and participated in better incentive alignment under the expectation that things would be better if only everybody did so... Well then things would already be better and we wouldn't be dreaming these dreams in the first place.
1. Journals want to publish lots of articles, so they are incentivised to provide a better publishing experience to authors (i.e. better tech, post-PDF science, etc) - Good.
2. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means they will relinquish their "prestige" factor and potentially end the reign of glam-journals - Good.
3. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means we can move to post-publication peer-review unimpeded - Good.
Journals should either become tech companies offering (and charging for) new and exciting ways to present scientific research, or simply stop existing.
Completely off topic, but thanks for creating AudioMulch, I don't use it actively anymore but it totally revolutionized how I approach working with sound!
They seem well-positioned to be such arbiters. Who else do you suggest and why are they better?
Nobody can possibly read every article and few have the expertise to decide. There is no reason to think the 'wisdom of the crowds' is reliable - and lots of experience and research showing it is not, and easily manipulated by nonsense. I don't want Reddit or Twitter.
The arbiters are just our colleagues, at the end of the day. The journal is just the organisational mechanism, one of many possible mechanisms.
For example, I follow a weekly reading list (https://superlab.ca) published by a group of motor control labs at Western University. Those people are my arbiters of quality.
I want to continue having arbiters, and I want it to be the same people (broadly speaking). I just don't want them to be organised around journals because journals are toxic and lead to concentrated power over scientific narratives.
A few central arbiters of the best research - e.g. Nature and Science - make science accessible outside your field, and outside professional science. Even reading those two publications is too much every week, with all the other reading, other activities, family, responsibilties, etc. on top of career.
> I just don't want them to be organised around journals because journals are toxic and lead to concentrated power over scientific narratives.
I don't care if it's journals, though people often assume that shifting power away from the current flawed institution to a new one will resolve the problems. The probems are inherent to power itself. We need a different structure with different incentives if we want a different outcome.
Journals should absolutely play a role in maintaining quality and curating what they publish.
For discoverability. Someone's trivial finding may be someone else's key to a major breakthrough, but little good it does if it can't be easily found
On top of that the chance of finding something as you suggest becomes that much more difficult. Smaller findings get published now in a more controlled scenario and get lost in the stream.
Major journals are a net positive for surfacing important science.
Non-experts sometimes bring perspectives that gatekeepers are blind to.
Not everyone.
Do you know that you can get rejected by arXiv if they think your publication is not worthy of their publication.
It's an open access journal masquerading as pre-print server. There are other much more open pre-print server.
In CS, this is definitely not the case at all.
If you remove the "quality badge" factor, journals are totally useless. Everyone in my field knows how to use LaTeX, produce a decent-looking PDF and upload it to arXiv. This saves you from paying APC's, has actually better discoverability (everyone checks arXiv as a one-stop shop for papers, almost no one goes to check the dozens of different journals) and much less hassle (no need to fiddle with arcane templates, idiosyncratic paper structures forced by each journal, idiosyncratic submission systems that look straight from the 90s, typesetters that introduce more errors than they fix, etc.).
I am pretty sure that journals, at least in my field, subsist precisely as arbiters of quality, they don't provide any other value at all.
For example, for me to progress in my current job I either need a doctorate or to have published a number of peer-reviewed articles in recognised journals as first author. I have written two IETF RFCs and these count for nothing.
I am not a scientist, I am a software developer. I am not employed as a scientist, I am employed as a software developer. But the rules of the organisation are thus.
dont worry, leadership will find another metric to turn into a target, after the old metric has stopped working for a decade or two.
Yes, in fact this is mainly what I meant with "quality badge". It's a badge mostly for instutitional bean-counting processes. Fellow scientists don't need it that much, typically we can separate the wheat from the chaff with a very quick skim.
What follows is totally offtopic, but to be honest I don't check Semantic Scholar much because I have a grudge with it. Profiles just don't work for authors with accented characters in the name (such as myself), papers get dispersed between multiple automatically-generated profiles. The staff is very helpful and will manually merge profiles for me when asked, but then I publish a new paper and wham, instead of incorporating it into the merged profile the system creates a new one. This has been going on for 6 years (if not more) and still unfixed.
For all the criticism that Google Scholar gets, I highly prefer it because it gets that right. It's extremely annoying when tools give you extra work for committing the sin of not having an Anglo-Saxon name (this is much more common than unaffected people would guess) and just don't seem to care to fix it.
Winners get to put a shiny sticker on their papers.
X.com operates this way, and it's not unreasonable.
At that point why even have a journal, let's just put everything as a Reddit post and be done with it. We will get comment abilities for free.
Maintaining quality standards is a good service, the journal system isn't perfect but its the only real check we have left.
Great question.
> the journal system isn't perfect but its the only real check we have left.
I wish I could agree but Nature et al continually publish bad, attention-grabbing science, while holding back the good science because it threatens the research programmes that gave the editorial board successful careers.
"Isn't perfect" is a massive understatement.
1. Open peer-review to anyone interested instead of only select few. HN is an example of this phenomenon but not for novelty specifically.
2. Permit publication of papers that are shorter for results to spread faster. AI papers are a good example of this phenomenon.
That's literally all I want them to do. I would love if they dwindled away to simply being monthly blog entries with magnet links to the articles, maybe with an introductory editorial.
We refuse to do this, because we have deeply integrated journals into a system of compensation for everyone involved. They're just magazines; "journal" is the beginning of the pomposity.
You could already publish a "fusion" journal where you link to the best articles in your field, and publish reviews of them - or even go back and forth with authors who want to be listed in your journal for a paper that they're about to publish. Outside of salaries, it would cost as much as a wordpress/patreon blog, or really, just a monthly twitter thread. The reason this doesn't happen is because it doesn't integrate with the academic financial system.
The only thing worthwhile about the journals is their brands, and the major ones in a lot of their fields (especially medicine) have ground their brands into dust through low quality. They continue through inertia: once anyone has ever made money doing something in the West, it will be preserved by any means necessary, because it's worth giving up part of that cash in order not to lose all of it. Scams are only ever defeated by bigger scams.
Nobody who is only important because they published in The Lancet will ever tolerate the devaluing of the idea of publishing in The Lancet, unless you give him a stipend for being involved in the next thing. Consequently, you're not going to be able to get a job from being published in Bob's Blog, no matter the quality of the peer review. Hence $1500 open access fees.
That's the first order effect, but you have to look beyond it. If authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for journals that have readers. The journals that are able to charge will be those that focus on their readership.
On the other hand predatory journals make a killing from APCs so there is some market for journals with no readers.
Most kids unfortunately did end up paying to publish.
If the tenure process focuses on quality of work, then it should work better.
The service they are providing is peer review and applying a reputable quality bar to submissions.
Think of it this way, if you have a good paper why would you publish on Arxiv instead of Nature? And then if you are Nature, why would you throw away this edge to become a free-to-publish (non-revenue-accruing) publication?
That is, unless ACM and Nature have a different approach to organizing peer review, in which case my correction is wrong. But I believe my point stands for many conferences and journals.
A different way to look at this is to question what "old slop" actually means.
The reason not to publish in Nature is that it might take a long time to get everything right in the paper to publish, to the point it takes years to get it read. Publishing fewer results faster spreads the results faster.
Publishers have a finite capacity based on the number of credible peer reviewers. In the past, it felt very exploitative as an academic doing peer review for the economic benefit of publishing houses. I'd much rather have "public good" publishers with open access -- at least I feel like the "free" labor is aligned with the desired outcome.
The only downside is when you will need to publish your paper, in case you can get closer to a university or organisation to help you finance that or choose to publish in another journal.
For several conferences I have been involved with, the publishers' duties included the princely tasks of nagging authors for copyright forms, counting pages, running some shell scripts over the LaTeX, and nagging about bad margins, improperly capitalized section headers, and captions being incorrectly above figures.
Frankly, in the digital age, the "publishers" are vestigial and subtractive from the Scientific process.
And who will curate the best research, especially for people outside your field? I can't follow the discussion in every field.
Journals receive papers for free, peer review is free, the only expenses are hosting a .pdf and maintaining an automated peer review system. I would've understood $14.50 but where does the two orders of magnitude higher number come from?
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131...
I guess the ACM fees are paying for stupid things like the new AI summaries.
Just to be clear this is specifically _gold open access_. There are other options like green (author can make article available elsewhere for free) and diamond (gold with no charge).
Compare this to diamond OA journals (e.g., in my field, https://theoretics.episciences.org/ or https://lmcs.episciences.org/) where reading and publishing is free for everyone. Of course, the people publishing in these journals are mostly academics from wealthy universities, but I think it's important that other authors can submit and publish there too.
Here’s the list of current members: https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/open-participants
My understanding is that this is at least to some degree in response to the surge of AI generated/assisted papers.
ACM started this open access effort back in 2020, I don't think that LLM generated papers were on their mind when they started it.
I work for a publishers and while this is true to some degree, we spend a lot of effort doing additional formatting or correcting formatting mistakes. For a typical journal publication, this process alone takes weeks if you're aiming at a high-quality publication.
On top of that, there are a lot of small things that you typically don't get if a paper is just put on the author's website, such as e.g. long-term archiving, a DOI, integration with services like dblp, metadata curation, etc.
Now, to what degree these features are an added value to you personally varies from person to person. Some people or even workshops are totally fine with simply publishing the PDFs written by the authors on a website, and there's nothing wrong with that, ymmv.
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520
But try to click on this one:
Bainbridge, L. 1983. Ironies of automation. Automatica 19(6): 775-779;
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0713/bb9d9b138e4e0a15406006...
Fail! No way to read the paper without paying or pirating by using scihub. This does not help humanity, it makes us look like morons.
I'm pleased that the other ACM references do work.
Would it be rude to print the link "https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8" but actually link to https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/0005-1098(83)90046-8 when you click it? :-)
https://typst.app/blog/2025/automated-generation
In addition to what @tokai said, I think it's also important to keep in mind that before Open Access the journal publishers charged subscription fees. The subscription fees were paid by universities and that was also likely largely taxpayer funded (e.g., using money from overheads charged to grants).
This isn't the golden age we might have hoped for, but open access is actually a desirable outcome even if as usual Capitalism tries to deliver the worst possible version for the highest possible price.
Elsevier makes over $3 billion dollars with the closed source model. They force institutions to pay for bundles of journals they do not want. The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money.
Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.
Elsevier is also[0] moving to APC for their journals because is better business.
>The Institutions often do not supply access to the general public despite the papers being produced with public money
Journals (usually) forbid you of sharing the published (supposedly edited) version of a paper. You're allowed to share the pre-published draft (see arXiv). Institutions could (and some indeed do) supply those drafts on their own.
>Paying the cost upfront from the grant increases the availability to the public.
At the expense of making research more expensive and hence more exclusive. It's money rather quality that matters now. Thus it isn't unsurprising that Frontiers & MDPI, two very known open-access proponent publishers, are also very known to publishing garbage.
[0]: https://www.elsevier.com/open-access
The garbage thing is really interesting. I'm going to propose another reason for garbage is Academia's reliance on publication as the primary means for giving promotions and judging peoples work. This leads to all kinds of disfunction.
Was it Nobel Prize Winner Peter Higgs that said his University wanted to fire him because he didn't publish frequently enough?
If researchers cannot pay the APC then PLoS often reduces the fee. Also - half of that grant money is used by the Institution as administrative overhead. If you want to decrease the cost of research that may be a better place to start.
I am a self-funded PhD student and no one paid me for the work that went into my open access paper. As it happens in this case the journal waived the publication fee, so no one paid anyone anything except I suppose the nominal pro-rata portion of my university fees that I paid.
While I do not disagree with this statement, this makes a significant difference for the citizens who do not happen to work in academia. Before open access, the journals would try to charge me $30-50 per article, which is ridiculous, it's a price of a textbook. Since my taxes fund public research in any case, I would prefer to be able to read the papers.
I would also love to be able to watch the talks at academic conferences, which are, to very large extent, paid by the authors, too.
Kidding, i agree $30-50 per article is outrageous.
The entire education system is a racket.
It should be free and open access, no registration, no user tracking, no data collection, no social features, just a simple searchable paper host that serves as official record and access. You'd need a simple payment portal for publishing rights, but fair use and linking to the official public host would allow people to link and discuss elsewhere.
It's not a hard technical problem, it's not expensive. We do things the stupid, difficult, convoluted way, because that's where bad faith actors get to pretend they're providing something of value in return for billions of dollars.
I wonder if we could form a graph that would make a collusion ring intuitively visible (I’m not sure what—between papers, authors, and signings—should be the edges and the nodes, though).
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